New Age Channelings - page 7 Who or What is being Channeled?" Picture on the left: "And Her Belly Lit Up the World" - 1996, oils

The Keepers of the Garden

I now come to the last book and last channeler that I want to discuss. Dolores Cannon who wrote "Keepers of the Garden" is not herself a channeler but works with regressive hypnosis, psychic research, and reincarnation and she records "lost know ledge". Cannon is a white American and describes herself as a former "typical navy-wife", who started doing this work after her husband retired and her family had grown up. Her other books are "Conversations with Nostradamus" and "Jesus and the Essenes", and she has worked with the Mutual UFO Network since 1987 on abduction cases.

The book is in the usual questions and answer format and explores how "Phil", a client of hers, discovers through regression hypnosis that he is in fact an alien recently incarnated on Earth. We follow him as he attempts to recover the memory of former lives, the reason he has come here and the task he had set himself to fulfill. That Phil had always felt alienated and as not belonging and a loner is taken by Cannon as proof that he is indeed an alien. But I wonder what teenager growing up in this sick alienating society does not feel this? We are taught to blame the Earth, our sins, our bodies or sexuality, everything but patriarchy, and we dream of going out into space to some other world, leaving our miseries behind. As long as we deny the greater Mother we will remain homeless.

Phil had however also experienced disturbing abductions and had been taken aboard UFOs and had been intimately examined, and even operated on. Many abductees seem to have had fearful experiences of cruel experiments, there are even rumours of rape by aliens and of pregnancies or foetuses implanted in human women. It would seem that there are different kinds of ETs and that some are less than benevolent and use humans in vivisection experiments, much like human scientists use animals. There are also many reports of animals found in fields mutilated, parts cut out and drained of blood. There are however speculations that both the abductions and animal mutilations might be horrific experiments carried out on human minds and animal bodies by secret US military experimenting with induced hallucinations and psychic warfare.

Whitley Streiber, who has experienced many abductions, writes on the other hand in ''Transformations'' (see note 50) that there are many similarities between these and the experiences of shamans world-wide who are dismembered by strange beings in other realms, and then sewn up, often with crystals in their bodies, to return with powers of healing and prophesy and ability to communicate with the spirits. Streiber thinks that abductions as well as spirit-flights take place in altered/trance states and can be life-changing. I myself have had lifechanging experiences  in altered states at sacred sites of the Goddess, gateways to other realms....

Phil has some grim tales to tell of how the aliens were his own kind, but he had an agreement with  them before this incarnation that he was to offer himself up for examination as they need human tissue and to study the human condition. This knowledge did not stop him from feeling terror even though it was all supposedly for the benefit of humanity and our future lives on other planets, and to perfect the human species. Phil had himself been an experimenter in another life . They need to study us and take samples and they seeded us...  or so they claim.

As the hypnotic regressions went on Phil began to channel "We the Council'', or Universal Custodians, who called him who called him "The Vehicle" and soon there was a group of people gathering regularly to hear the messages. In this book Earth is the ultimate passive mother, totally unable to create life. The seeds for life on Earth had been lovingly tended in a garden on a distant planet, and ''Space Brothers'' cultivate planets preparing them for the seed. We are seeded from those gardens. Only beings of lesser stature, such as vegetables and trees, had naturally evolved on Earth to serve the seeded ones. Space beings also bred with animals to change the genetic stock. Animals are our ''brothers'' but are of dual nature: the light/etheric and the dark/material/physical. 

That Dolores Cannon, who herself has borne a number of children. can accept this nonsense beats me, and that she can accept such views of trees, who are ancient sacred venerable beings. In many mythologies, such as the Nordic one, the first humans were born out of  trees and a giant ancient tree, Yggdrasil, was thought to hold up the world. The "Space Brothers" very much like our scientists who envy women's creative and life giving powers, desire to clone themselves and genetically engineer life outside the womb, and see themselves as sort of male "mothers".

We are told that there is a Territorial headquarters in the galaxy where planet material is examined for examples of sod and vegetation. Things had not gone according plan on Earth. A meteor had crashed here, from another part of the universe, and it had brought "weeds" and a disfiguring and disruptive virus as well as life-organisms that mingled with and contaminated the seeded ones. As a result disease and death came to Earth. The "Director of this local universe" had called meetings to discuss the contamination and it was decided to cultivate another planet which now has reached the seeding stage, and some humans are to be transplanted there. Earth Herself is to be transformed, time has come for Her to be reborn, thus fulfilling Her destiny.

The aliens are now coming here to examine the fruits of their labour and are entirely entitled to do so. They are testing us to make sure that all disability and disease will be eliminated and only genetically superior humans transferred to other worlds. In typical New Age speak "your time to fly with your brothers has now approached" as the soul leaves Earth and She is to be raised to universal consciousness. We are not to cling to the bad old ways and must assist the birth and not fight it.

(These were Alice Bailey's words too, and the gist of so much present New Age thinking - see the introduction.) In other words we are not to act against environmental destruction, nor act politically against injustice and on Earth's behalf.

Although "the most exalted ruler of the universe" is described as a pure energy form, and therefore presumably without gender, "He" is said to live in the "Hall of God" from where star-ships travel to seed life on the Mother planets. There is also an armada of planetary beings out there watching us and feeding us information and influencing world leaders. The Washington Monument is a trans­mitter for the world through which "the Brothers of the Universe" watch events on Earth as on a TV screen. This is also a monitoring system that keeps track of us. Big Brother is watching after all, or so Phil says.

The ETs want a world government as it is simpler to deal with for "those who are to walk into the Light" (see note 51) . The space landings are predestined and Armageddon is just a way to describe the coming death and rebirth that will happen during the time of great changes. "We, the Council", who also call themselves the collective subconscious of the Vehicle (Phil), speak of Universal custodianship and explain that hierarchies and government are also inherent in the spiritworld. They say that Earth, here called a "restless old woman who turns and frets", will realign and reawaken during the next 18 years. This process started in 1984 and will only be dangerous if hurried, as the case would be in a nuclear war. There will be transportations en mass with space ships to a planet in another solar system which is within our galaxy. Only those most productive and without genetic defects will be allowed to emigrate, those of the Highest Nature, in Phil's words. No "criminals" welcome. Those that are left behind will have to cope with, and clean up, after the Earth changes, and to start anew. Beings of light, of a Pleiadean nature, will assist those who stay here.

Apparently there were always alien visitors here but actual incarnations, such as Phil's, are more recent. It is only thanks to such visitors that humans have evolved at all. "We, the Council" speak of a civilisation within the Earth (as did Ramtha) and explains that the Atlanteans had misused their advanced medical technology to enlarge their sexual organs and had been punished for this. (This will have to be the most absurd explanation I have so far read for the destruction of Atlantis!) The Atlanteans who live on in the subterranean world are our ancestors and they are "the Keepers of the faith". These beings bring and keep lost knowledge and are supposedly known by members of the US government. Shambhala is rumoured, remember, to be a subterranean Atlantean city.

The visitors to Earth, the so-called "Greys", are mostly a kind of humanoid android, or energy-being, that can maintain mental energy and are programmed to serve. They are small and grey, have large eyes and have volunteered for this mission. They respond to human emotion but are manufac­tured in a process which is more like an assembly than a growth. They are elements of machines with mental responsiveness that do the bidding of the Masters of the Universe and are the under­lings in a warlike command. These androids do the examinations on abducted, fearful, humans but claim to come in "total love and absolute service"....and so on and so on.

I cannot say that I feel in the least comforted or inspired by any of the above and feel that many of the channeled books I have discussed advocate a creeping Techno-fascism and rightwing politics. I find them sinister and frightening and I find them all supporting the present patriarchal and racist status quo. None of them, except for Benjamin Creme's Maitreya, question the New World Order as planned by the USA and the West.

At the same time I have to come back though to the question of whether these entities are Intra or Ultra or Extra terrestrials, whether we ourselves project sick scenarios onto spirit entities who are by their nature neutral and can both help or hinder. Are they the Faeries, the Shining ones of the past or the Elements, are they the Allies encountered on ecstatic shamanic journeys into other realities, who have the ability to give us powers of healing and prophesy and second sight, but now appear as aliens in UFOs? Has our sick patriarchal culture so bunkered us that we can only perceive them in terror or as shiny technological computerised monstrosities, hostile to Earth-based life and our mother-born, sexual, bleeding powerful and sensitive body-minds? Most of all we must remember that we ourselves are embodied spirits. and that after death we live on in those realms, that we are our own ancestors It is also possible that how we perceive the past and the future actually alters things, that we interact with and influence what happens and has happened. It is therefore of greatest urgency that we envision and reimagine the Great Mother and a possible egalitarian, just, and free ipast and future based in maternal values. If those Secret Masters and Extraterrestrials actually exist in an alien realm hostile to Earth we better watch out however.

I have recently come across books, by Barbara Hand Clow ,The Pleiadian Agenda (see note 51a) and Barbara Marciniak, Earth: Pleiadian Keys to the Living Library (see note 52), which suggest that Aliens or ET's are our own past as well as future (genetically modified or altered) selves. They are both written as if in a stream of consciousness and are at least not misogynist. They even speak of the Goddess,the sacredness of women's blood and have a positive attitude to sexuality  which is normally unheard of in channeled books

It has struck me when reading the so common abduction experiences - common in the USA, that is - how similar they are to alienated high-tech hospital births. Nowhere in :he world are births more technologically managed than in the USA and nowhere might they be more terrifying to the new­born. The child dragged out of its drugged mother who more than likely will have had a completely unnecessary caesarian, held up in bright searing light by a masked alien being in a room full of scary equipment that is as if designed to frighten both mother and child.

I wonder whether this so negative experience of birth might somehow be remembered or triggered and replayed as if it was an actual abduction by aliens, with its attendant bright lights and terrifying scenes of medical experimentation, at times of great stress. Or... perhaps this experience is triggered, as Albert Budden suggests (see note 53) as a hallucination induced byradiation from artificial electro­magnetic fields. The Earth Mother is now suffering and being suffocated by electromagnetic over­load and this is affecting our psyches. We become ill and mad

Birth was a sacrament in the world of the Goddess and Her Shaman-priestesses were also midwives and healers.

It was my own experience of natural birth in 1961 that first opened me to the Great/er Mother who is both dark and light and changed the course of my entire life as a woman and artist. The god who claims to be a father and sole creator of life, and his male priests, have done all in their power to take this experience away from us.

It does seen: strange the way the patriarchal, monotheistic godhead and his underlings so consistently and for several thousands of years have preached hatred of the Earth Mother, racism and misogyny. Why? Many questions. If the patriarchal gods are spacemen, as some claim, then they must cone from a space of envy and spite towards Mother Earth. That they claim to act out of "higher values", morality and spirituality is incredible. They fraudulently claim that our destruction is a step upwards towards the immortality of the individual soul and that Earth's destruction is her rebirth into a higher and illumined form. These are lies that the New Age movement has adopted and they must be thoroughly questioned if we want to survive on, and with, our beautiful and sacred Mother Earth.

Monica Sjöö
31 October 1997 Bristol

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